Flag Placement
On Saturday, May 27th, members of the Slattery Detachment met at the American Legion to do the annual Memorial Day flag placing. It is a Slattery tradition which held each year on the Saturday before Memorial Day. The event took place after a gathering breakfast which started at 7:30. There was the coffee, orange juice and donuts.
The lite snacks were enjoyed by members of the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Marine Corps League, along with local Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and several Eagle Scouts and leaders, The local Hanover Township Fire Department was in attendance also. After the snacks everyone headed out to the local Gate of Heaven Cemetery & Mausoleum in East Hanover to plant the flags.
Because of the limited amount of members of the Slattery Detachment we joined up with the VFW Post 5351 members to do our sections. In years gone by normally there were 7 to 10 of our members and their families, but this day there was only 3 Marines. The Marines were Tom Miller, Jim Loizides and Tony Fiorentino. The VFW which Tom & Tony belong to were joined by 2 others so the five veterans did 6 sections of the cemetery.
It was a beautiful day and the grass was dry. The only thing that wasn’t so great was the ground was like a rock and placing the flags was not an easy job. It was too bad the old gang wasn’t there as it would have been an easy hour. After the flags were placed in our sections we traveled to the Chris Cosgrove and the Robert J. Slattery grave sites. There after placing new flags, this small Slattery group saluted and then Jim gave a meaningful prayer. It was another tradition which we could not omit.
After we were done with the placements, we went back to the American Legion for beer, birch beer, potatoe chips and hotdogs. I left the Legion and went to Uncle Giuseppe’s to hawk “poppies” and did pretty well collecting over $500 for the four hours of beautiful sunny weather. I also collected a super Sunburn on my arms and back of my neck.
All in all it was a beautiful meaningful day to pay our respects to our veterans.
